Bots, tools, bots and more bots (and more tools!)

So here I am posting about an enciting 3D engine I picked up. I purchased the Torque Game Engine from Garage Games sometime ago and have been consuming the code and scripts as much as possible, trying out things and generally acting like a newb. I think I´m comfortable now and it´s time to dive into the system.

I have a couple of interests that I´m going to pursue with Torque.

First and foremost, I´m a tool guy. I´ve written tools for games like MageSlayer, Doom, Half-Life, Quake and others. My current venture is about 30 tools written for The Sims which has consumed my life for the past few years. So now it´s time to turn some focus to Torque (and Torque 2). The tools are nice but could use some work. Some new features, documentation and GUI refab. I´m looking at doing some damage in this space so hopefully watch for contributions soon.

Secondly I love bots. I wrote a thesis, so many years ago, on Human AI systems so bots are just the next best thing (well, there´s Eliza but we won´t get into that here). Over the years I´ve studied the various bot code from games like Quake and Unreal Tournament and basically bots are getting better and better. The Torque bots can only improve from here.

There have been several contributions to the bot base here and I´m glad it´s alive and thriving. I´m just starting to fork my engine code to support the real-time support that some people have put together and looking at modularizing my own code so I might be able to offer a script driven (with some C++ changes) bot engine. Lots of fun stuff to do here and will give me both a chance to prove myself with the Torque engine and contribute something back to the community.

That´s about it for now. Time to fire up yet another programming adventure…